I am a man of domestic habits and very happy in my family and a few friends,whose company I quit with reluctance to join other circles.Luke Howard, February 1822

Study of clouds Goethe

In 1812 Johann Wolfgang Goethe, as Director of the Institute for Arts and Science in the Duchy of Saxony-Weimar, was active in trying to establish a network of stations for meteorological observation; a uniform grid for all data to be collected. It was the translation of Luke Howard’s paper appearing in Annalen der Physik in 1815 which drew his attention to the English meteorologist.

Goethe recognised the importance of Luke Howard’s scheme for naming clouds which chimed with his own interest in observing and recording the forms of clouds and provided the key to understanding nature which he had been seeking.

From Richard Hamlyn in The Invention of Clouds:For Goethe the identification and naming of the clouds had done nothing less than transfigure mankind’s relationship with aerial nature. The clouds had been released into the scientific consciousness, from where they could reach further, into the realm of the pure intellectual spirit, as addressed in the last line of ‘Nimbus.’ The greatness of Howard’s classification, for Goethe, was that it accounted for the material forces of cloud formation while allowing for the immaterial forces of poetic response to be heard. And his poems, like the essay which preceded them, took the form of just such a response. Art could answer science, it could find within it not only a source of subject matter but a source of real inspiration. Goethe’s cloud poems, as reactions to an energizing scientific insight, were heartfelt, joyous and sincere.

Goethe’s personal study of clouds led him to want to know more about this young man whose studies had given him so much enjoyment. And in 1821 he asked JC Huttner at the Foreign Office to ask him to find out more about the meteorologist.

Once Luke Howard had been convinced by his friends that Goethe, the great German poet, philosopher and diplomat, really did want to know more about him and that the request was not a hoax, he wrote:The celebrated writer, whom I thus for the first time and without economy address, is desirous, as I learn from his Friend in London, of having for the information of the German public, some account of the person who wrote the ‘Essay on the Modification of Clouds’. As no one is probably as well prepared to furnish, at present, what may be suitable for this purpose, as myself – and as there are several reasons why I should not withhold it now that the request has been made – a Memoir is subjoined which I have taken the liberty to write (as seems to be the most natural method) in the first person (having neither so much to say as Benjamin Franklin, nor so much to pass over as Julius Caesar).

The autobiography began:I was born in (Red Cross Street) London, the 28th of the El.venth Month (November) 1772, and am respectably descended. By this I mean, that my Father, Robert Howard, my grandfather of the same name and, as far as I have been able to learn my great grandfather were persons of probity, respectable in their station as tradesmen or manufacturers and allied in marriage with persons having a similar claim to consideration…

On reading the few pages of autobiography which Luke Howard had modestly written, Goethe, at this stage an elderly man wrote:

For a long time nothing has given me so much pleasure as the autobiography of Mr. Howard, which I received yesterday and have been thinking of ever since. In truth nothing more pleasant could have happened to me than to see the tender religious soul of such an excellent man opened out to me in such a way that he has been able to lay bare for me the story of his destiny and development as well as his innermost convictions.

Although they never met, Goethe referred to Luke Howard as ‘Master’, the only Englishman he addressed thus.

Goethe praised Luke Howard for:

bestowing form on the formless, and a system ofordered change in a boundless worldand wrote these additional verses for him:

AtmosphäreThe world’s enormous fact,The pure height of the sky:I grasp this with the eyeBut it eludes my intellect.When such infinity enshroudsAnalysis must needs be strong.Thus it is my airborne songGives thanks to the “Namer of Clouds”.

Translation by Anthony HowellThank you to Nick Jacobs for the text of Atmosphäre,the first part of Goethe’s Trilogy to Luke Howard